(Image credit: Motorola/Nokia/Nintendo/Pure Digital/BlackBerry)

Since I cover tech for a living I get asked the same questions by friends and family every time we get together. Like “What’s new and cool right now,” or “What’s the next big thing?”

My answers have gotten less and less exciting over time. In the last 20 years, we’ve traded fun and sometimes wonderfully weird hardware innovation for iteration. Yes, smart phones are getting thinner and their cameras are getting better. But today, AI features are a much bigger deal now than hardware.

Think about gadgets 20 years ago and how interesting and different they were compared to what we’re getting today.…